BeagleBrainz wrote: Can out get physical access to the row\col of the keyboard matrix ? if so a 7i73 could be the answer if you are going the MESA route of a custom USB solution, Arduino ProMicro or another mcu that has native USB.
Or as per your solution an MCU reading the serial and connecting via USB.
Any pics of the guts of the device ?
I do have pics, but it's basically a PIC, a serial interface etc. The keyboard is of course a row/col matrix, but the hardware is doing just fine. The serial interface works perfectly - the cable etc is a regular one, and I've got a couple of serial interfaces on the industrial PC's that I use.
The only real question is how I can get the ASCII from the serial interface and into LinuxCNC.
It would seem one option is to somehow get it to appear as a serial keyboard (well, it basically is a traditional serial keyboard!) and then use
HAL_input to access the input device. As that seems a bit hokey and going to require building kernel drivers etc (there's got to be something out there already?!), the easiest options are:
a) a standalone python script that uses the linuxcnc module, and listens to the serial interface. It can then be mapped to pins accordingly - I do need to figure out how to interact with the Axis UI (ie flipping between menus), but I can always extend Axis to use pins to determine the menu to show etc.
b) an extension menu/module for Axis using python - pretty much as above, but run as a menu/integral script.
Not a big job really, but it's figuring the most lazy/efficient way of getting the ASCII characters into the right place. Nicely, the keyboard generates both keydown and keyup characters, so I can have modifiers, or have repeats on axis nudging for example (ie keep moving the axis until keyup).
These keyboards are very nice, so if this works well I'll be lining up to get a few more
